Beijing's Olympic Cleanup Sends
Migrants and Homeless Packing

By

Sky Canaves

Updated Aug. 5, 2008 12:01 a.m. ET

BEIJING -- Fresh walls already have been built around much of the nameless shop on Baoshi Street, a small lane near Tiananmen Square, though there is just enough room for customers to come and go. Inside, Wang Binjiang is holding a closeout sale.

As it prepares to present a sanitized and modern city during the Olympic Games, Beijing pushes out its thousands of migrant workers that scour the city for recyclable scraps. Video courtesy of Reuters. (July 14)

For the past seven years, Mr. Wang has worked for his cousin selling luggage, pajamas and small tools in this neighborhood, along with two other men from the same small town in Zhejiang province, on China's east coast. Each night, the three men roll out their mats and sleep on the floor of the 200-square-foot shop. Now, the building that houses the shop is due to be knocked down, and without permanent-residence status in Beijing, the men aren't eligible for assistance from the local government.

"August 6 will be our last day," says Mr. Wang, 28 years old. "We must shut before the Olympics."

The Olympic Games are an occasion of celebration for many Beijing residents, whose city has been given a facelift ahead of the Games, which start Friday. For Mr. Wang and many others, the Games are a harbinger of economic hardship. The expulsions seem to strike a backward note for a country out to stage an Olympics worthy of its remarkable rise on the global stage. China stands out for how it "forcibly displaces people on such a scale," says
Nicholas Bequelin,
China research director for the New York activist group Human Rights Watch.

Chinese authorities have defended the practices as meeting the demands of development and social stability and have strongly denied abuses. The central government has cautioned local officials against being overzealous.

Beijing 2008

Taking into account a government shutdown of the construction projects that employ many migrant workers, hundreds of thousands of migrants may already have been sent packing ahead of the Olympics. Many left in late July, when the city imposed the two-month shutdown. Others were swept out in a pre-Games crackdown on unregistered residents.

Mr. Wang and his co-workers are among those who are holding out. "We won't go back home. There's nothing to do, no money to be made there, and our plot of farmland is too small," says Mr. Wang, who earns 800 yuan (about $115) a month working at his cousin's pajamas-and-luggage store.

Migrant workers aren't the only ones affected. Homeless Beijing residents have been sent to relief centers on the outskirts of the city, while countless others have been forced to temporarily shutter businesses deemed "undesirable," which can include innocuous roadside food vendors to seedy massage parlors.

The new shopping area in Qianmen is slated to open to the public on Thursday. Sky Canaves

Wang Xijing is among the Beijing natives who have found themselves on the losing end of the Games. Mr. Wang (no relation to the store employee) used to run a supermarket in the middle of a lively street market at a busy intersection in the eastern part of town. The whole market was closed "for the Olympics," he says. He relocated his store to what used to be his warehouse -- a hole in a wall, under a footbridge. But most of his customers were migrant workers, so now his business is down by 40%.

While a permanent return to the routine authoritarianism of prereform China would likely be impossible, in the short term, and for the Games, citizens such as Mr. Wang are resigned to their fate.

"What can be done?" he says. "It is the Olympics, and we must do what the government says."

Protests are rare and quickly put down. On Monday, about 20 aggrieved residents briefly gathered near Tiananmen Square to protest their eviction from the Qianmen area without adequate compensation, the Associated Press reported, and were soon forced to disband by members of the local neighborhood committee as police surrounded the area. Most of the Qing Dynasty-era buildings in Qianmen have been demolished to make way for a shopping area scheduled to open to the public Thursday, just in time for the Olympics.

As the capital, Beijing also serves as a last resort for petitioners from all over the country who are unable to resolve their problems at the local level, often because of official corruption. In preparing for the Olympics, the city began demolishing the low-rent neighborhoods near long-distance train stations where petitioners typically lived while pursuing their cases.

In late June, the central government launched a nationwide effort to ensure that the number of petitioners in Beijing during the Games is strictly limited. Today, by many estimates, more than 90% of the petitioners, who used to number in the tens of thousands, are gone. Of the 3,000 to 4,000 who remain, many are in hiding, says Liu Anjun, a Beijing advocate for petitioners.

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